Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards, Chicago. The young man has
hinted vaguely of a quarrel between himself and Helen Heath, who is in
New York with her mother, and has suggested that the old man act as
peacemaker.
V
NEW YORK, December 8, 189-.
_Dear Pierrepont_: I've been afraid all along that you were going to
spoil the only really sensible thing you've ever done by making some
fool break, so as soon as I got your letter I started right out to
trail down Helen and her ma. I found them hived up here in the hotel,
and Miss Helen was so sweet to your poor old pa that I saw right off
she had a stick cut for his son. Of course, I didn't let on that I
knew anything about a quarrel, but I gradually steered the
conversation around to you, and while I don't want to hurt your
feelings, I am violating no confidence when I tell you that the
mention of your name aroused about the same sort of enthusiasm that
Bill Bryan's does in Wall Street--only Helen is a lady and so she
couldn't cuss. But it wasn't the language of flowers that I saw in her
eyes. So I told her that she must make allowances for you, as you were
only a half-baked boy, and that, naturally, if she stuck a hat-pin
into your crust she was going to strike a raw streak here and there.
She sat up a little at that, and started in to tell me that while you
had said "some very, very cruel, cruel things to her, still--" But I
cut her short by allowing that, sorry as I was to own it, I was afraid
you had a streak of the brute in you, and I only hoped that you
wouldn't take it out on her after you were married.
Well, sir, the way she flared up, I thought that all the Fourth of
July fireworks had gone off at once. The air was full of
trouble--trouble in set pieces and bombs and sizzy rockets and
sixteen-ball Roman candles, and all pointed right at me. Then it came
on to rain in the usual way, and she began to assure me between
showers that you were so kind and gentle that it hurt you to work, or
to work at my horrid pig-sticking business, I forget which, and I
begged her pardon for having misjudged you so cruelly, and then the
whole thing sort of simmered off into a discussion of whether I
thought you'd rather she wore pink or blue at breakfast. So I guess
you're all right. Only you'd better write quick and apologize.
I didn't get at the facts of the quarrel, but you're in the wrong. A
fellow's always in the wrong when he quarrels with a woman, and even
if he wasn't at the start he's sure to be before he gets through. And
a man who's decided to marry can't be too quick learning to apologize
for things he didn't say and to be forgiven for things he didn't do.
When you differ with your wife, never try to reason out who's in the
wrong, because you'll find that after you've proved it to her shell
still have a lot of talk left that she hasn't used.
Of course, it isn't natural and it isn't safe for married people, and
especially young married people, not to quarrel a little, but you'll
save a heap of trouble if you make it a rule never to refuse a request
before breakfast and never to grant one after dinner. I don't know why
it is, but most women get up in the morning as cheerful as a
breakfast-food ad., while a man will snort and paw for trouble the
minute his hoofs touch the floor. Then, if you'll remember that the
longer the last word is kept the bitterer it gets, and that your wife
is bound to have it anyway, you'll cut the rest of your quarrels so
short that she'll never find out just how much meanness there is in
you. Be the silent partner at home and the thinking one at the office.
Do your loose talking in your sleep.
Of course, if you get a woman who's really fond of quarreling there
isn't any special use in keeping still, because she'll holler if you
talk back and yell if you don't. The best that you can do is to
pretend that you've got a chronic case of ear-ache, and keep your ears
stuffed with cotton. Then, like as not, she'll buy you one of these
things that you hold in your mouth so that you can hear through your
teeth.
I don't believe you're going to draw anything of that sort with Helen,
but this is a mighty uncertain world, especially when you get to
betting on which way the kitten is going to jump--you can usually
guess right about the cat--and things don't always work out as
planned.
While there's no sure rule for keeping out of trouble in this world,
there's a whole set of them for getting into it.
I remember a mighty nice, careful mother who used to shudder when
slang was used in her presence. So she vowed she'd give _her_ son a
name that the boys couldn't twist into any low, vulgar nick-name. She
called him Algernon, but the kid had a pretty big nose, and the first
day he was sent to school with his long lace collar and his short
velvet pants the boys christened him Snooty, and now his parents are
the only people who know what his real name is.
After you've been married a little while you're going to find that
there are two kinds of happiness you can have--home happiness and
fashionable happiness. With the first kind you get a lot of children
and with the second a lot of dogs. While the dogs mind better and seem
more affectionate, because they kiss you with their whole face, I've
always preferred to associate with children. Then, for the first kind
of happiness you keep house for yourself, and for the second you keep
house for the neighbors.
You can buy a lot of home happiness with a mighty small salary, but
fashionable happiness always costs just a little more than you're
making. You can't keep down expenses when you've got to keep up
appearances--that is, the appearance of being something that you
ain't. You're in the fix of a dog chasing his tail--you can't make
ends meet, and if you do it'll give you such a crick in your neck that
you won't get any real satisfaction out of your gymnastics. You've got
to live on a rump-steak basis when you're alone, so that you can
appear to be on a quail-on-toast basis when you have company. And
while they're eating your quail and betting that they're cold-storage
birds, they'll be whispering to each other that the butcher told their
cook that you lived all last week on a soup-bone and two pounds of
Hamburger steak. Your wife must hog it around the house in an old
wrapper, because she's got to have two or three of those dresses that
come high on the bills and low on the shoulders, and when she wears
'em the neighbors are going to wonder how much you're short in your
accounts. And if you've been raised a shouting Methodist and been used
to hollering your satisfaction in a good hearty Glory! or a
Hallelujah! you've got to quit it and go to one of those churches
where the right answer to the question, "What is the chief end of
man?" is "Dividend," and where they think you're throwing a fit and
sick the sexton on to you if you forget yourself and whoop it up a
little when your religion gets to working.
Then, if you do have any children, you can't send them to a plain
public school to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic, because
they've got to go to a fashionable private one to learn hog-Latin,
hog-wash, and how much the neighbors are worth. Of course, the rich
children are going to say that they're pushing little kids, but
they've got to learn to push and to shove and to butt right in where
they're not wanted if they intend to herd with the real angora
billy-goats. They've got to learn how to bow low to every one in front
of them and to kick out at every one behind them. It's been my
experience that it takes a good four-year course in snubbing before
you can graduate a first-class snob.
Then, when you've sweat along at it for a dozen years or so, you'll
wake up some morning and discover that your appearances haven't
deceived any one but yourself. A man who tries that game is a good
deal like the fellow who puts on a fancy vest over a dirty shirt--he's
the only person in the world who can't see the egg-spots under his
chin. Of course, there isn't any real danger of your family's wearing
a false front while I'm alive, because I believe Helen's got too much
sense to stand for anything of the sort; but if she should, you can
expect the old man around with his megaphone to whisper the real
figures to your neighbors.
I don't care how much or how little money you make--I want you to
understand that there's only one place in the world where you can live
a happy life, and that's inside your income. A family that's living
beyond its means is simply a business that's losing money, and it's
bound to go to smash. And to keep a safe distance ahead of the sheriff
you've got to make your wife help. More men go broke through bad
management at home than at the office. And I might add that a lot of
men who are used to getting only one dollar's worth of food for a
five-dollar bill down-town, expect their wives to get five dollars'
worth of food for a one-dollar bill at the corner grocery, and to save
the change toward a pair of diamond earrings. These fellows would
plant a tin can and kick because they didn't get a case of tomatoes.
Of course, some women put their husband's salaries on their backs
instead of his ribs; but there are a heap more men who burn up their
wives' new sealskin sacques in two-bit cigars. Because a man's a good
provider it doesn't always mean that he's a good husband--it may mean
that he's a hog. And when there's a cuss in the family and it comes
down to betting which, on general principles the man always carries my
money. I make mistakes at it, but it's the only winning system I've
ever been able to discover in games of chance.
You want to end the wedding trip with a business meeting and talk to
your wife quite as frankly as you would to a man whom you'd taken into
partnership. Tell her just what your salary is and then lay it out
between you--so much for joint expenses, the house and the
housekeeping, so much for her expenses, so much for yours, and so much
to be saved. That last is the one item on which you can't afford to
economize. It's the surplus and undivided profits account of your
business, and until the concern accumulates a big one it isn't safe to
move into offices on Easy Street.
A lot of fool fathers only give their fool daughters a liberal
education in spending, and it's pretty hard to teach those women the
real facts about earning and saving, but it's got to be done unless
you want to be the fool husband of a fool wife. These girls have an
idea that men get money by going to a benevolent old party behind some
brass bars and shoving a check at him and telling him that they want
it in fifties and hundreds.
You should take home your salary in actual money for a while, and
explain that it's all you got for sweating like a dog for ten hours a
day, through six long days, and that the cashier handed it out with an
expression as if you were robbing the cash-drawer of an orphan asylum.
Make her understand that while those that have gets, when they present
a check, those that haven't gets it in the neck. Explain that the
benevolent old party is only on duty when papa's daughter has a papa
that Bradstreet rates AA, and that when papa's daughter's husband
presents a five-dollar check with a ten-cent overdraft, he's received
by a low-browed old brute who calls for the bouncer to put him out.
Tell her right at the start the worst about the butcher, and the
grocer, and the iceman, and the milkman, and the plumber, and the
gas-meter--that they want their money and that it has to come out of
that little roll of bills. Then give her enough to pay them, even if
you have to grab for your lunch from a high stool. I used to know an
old Jew who said that the man who carved was always a fool or a hog,
but you've got to learn not to divide your salary on either basis.
Make your wife pay cash. A woman never really understands money till
she's done that for a while. I've noticed that people rarely pay down
the money for foolish purchases--they charge them. And it's mighty
seldom that a woman's extravagant unless she or her husband pays the
bills by check. There's something about counting out the actual legal
tender on the spot that keeps a woman from really wanting a lot of
things which she thinks she wants.
When I married your ma, your grandpa was keeping eighteen niggers busy
seeing that the family did nothing. She'd had a liberal education,
which, so far as I've been able to find out, means teaching a woman
everything except the real business that she's going into--that is, if
she marries. But when your ma swapped the big house and the eighteen
niggers for me and an old mammy to do the rough work, she left the
breakfast-in-bed, fine-lady business behind her and started right in
to get the rest of the education that belonged to her. She did a
mighty good job, too, all except making ends meet, and they were too
elastic for her at first--sort of snapped back and left a deficit just
when she thought she had them together.
She was mighty sorry about it, but she'd never heard of any way of
getting money except asking papa for it, and she'd sort of supposed
that every one asked papa when they wanted any, and, why didn't I ask
papa? I finally made her see that I couldn't ask my papa, because I
hadn't any, and that I couldn't ask hers, because it was against the
rules of the game as I played it, and that was her first real lesson
in high finance and low finances.
I gave her the second when she came to me about the twentieth of the
month and kissed me on the ear and sent a tickly little whisper after
it to the effect that the household appropriation for the month was
exhausted and the pork-barrel and the meal-sack and the chicken-coop
were in the same enfeebled condition.
I didn't say anything at first, only looked pretty solemn, and then I
allowed that she'd have to go into the hands of a receiver. Well, sir,
the way she snuggled up to me and cried made me come pretty close to
weakening, but finally I told her that I reckoned I could manage to be
appointed by the court and hush up the scandal so the neighbors
wouldn't hear of it.
I took charge of her little books and paid over to myself her
housekeeping money each month, buying everything myself, but
explaining every move I made, until in the end I had paid her out of
debt and caught up with my salary again. Then I came home on the first
of the month, handed out her share of the money, and told her that the
receiver had been discharged by the court.
My! but she was pleased. And then she paid me out for the scare I'd
given her by making me live on side-meat and corn-bread for a month,
so she'd be sure not to get the sheriff after her again. Of course, I
had to tell her all about it in the end, and though she's never
forgotten what she learned about money during the receivership, she's
never quite forgiven the receiver.
Speaking of receiving, I notice the receipts of hogs are pretty light.
Hold your lard prices up stiff to the market. It looks to me as if
that Milwaukee crowd was getting under the February delivery.
Your affectionate father,
JOHN GRAHAM.
P.S.--You've got to square me with Helen.
No. 6
From John Graham, at the Waldorf-Astoria, New York, to his son,
Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards, Chicago. The young man has
written describing the magnificent wedding presents that are being
received, and hinting discreetly that it would not come amiss if he
knew what shape the old man's was going to take, as he needs the
money.
VI
NEW YORK, December 12, 189-.
_Dear Pierrepont_: These fellows at the branch house here have been
getting altogether too blamed refined to suit me in their ideas of
what's a fair day's work, so I'm staying over a little longer than I
had intended, in order to ring the rising bell for them and to get
them back into good Chicago habits. The manager started in to tell me
that you couldn't do any business here before nine or ten in the
morning--and I raised that boy myself!
We had a short season of something that wasn't exactly prayer, but was
just as earnest, and I think he sees the error of his ways. He seemed
to feel that just because he was getting a fair share of the business
I ought to be satisfied, but I don't want any half-sports out gunning
with me. It's the fellow that settles himself in his blind before the
ducks begin to fly who gets everything that's coming to his decoys. I
reckon we'll have to bring this man back to Chicago and give him a
beef house where he has to report at five before he can appreciate
what a soft thing it is to get down to work at eight.
I'm mighty glad to hear you're getting so many wedding presents that
you think you'll have enough to furnish your house, only you don't
want to fingermark them looking to see it a hundred-thousand-dollar
check from me ain't slipped in among them, because it ain't.
I intend to give you a present, all right, but there's a pretty wide
margin for guessing between a hundred thousand dollars and the real
figures. And you don't want to feel too glad about what you've got,
either, because you're going to find out that furnishing a house with
wedding presents is equivalent to furnishing it on the installment
plan. Along about the time you want to buy a go-cart for the twins,
you'll discover that you'll have to make Tommy's busted old
baby-carriage do, because you've got to use the money to buy a
tutti-frutti ice-cream spoon for the young widow who sent you a
doormat with "Welcome" on it. And when she gets it, the young widow
will call you that idiotic Mr. Graham, because she's going to have
sixteen other tutti-frutti ice-cream spoons, and her doctor's told her
that if she eats sweet things she'll have to go in the front door like
a piano--sideways.
Then when you get the junk sorted over and your house furnished with
it, you're going to sit down to dinner on some empty soap-boxes, with
the soup in cut-glass finger-bowls, and the fish on a hand-painted
smoking-set, and the meat on dinky, little egg-shell salad plates, with
ice-cream forks and fruit knives to eat with. You'll spend most of that
meal wondering why somebody didn't send you one of those hundred and
sixteen piece five-dollar-ninety-eight-marked-down-from-six sets of
china. While I don't mean to say that the average wedding present
carries a curse instead of a blessing, it could usually repeat a few
cuss-words if it had a retentive memory.
Speaking of wedding presents and hundred-thousand-dollar checks
naturally brings to mind my old friend Hamilton Huggins--Old Ham they
called him at the Yards--and the time he gave his son, Percival, a
million dollars.
Take him by and large, Ham was as slick as a greased pig. Before he
came along, the heft of the beef hearts went into the fertilizer
tanks, but he reasoned out that they weren't really tough, but that
their firmness was due to the fact that the meat in them was naturally
condensed, and so he started putting them out in his celebrated
condensed mincemeat at ten cents a pound. Took his pigs' livers, too,
and worked 'em up into a genuine Strasburg pâté de foie gras that made
the wild geese honk when they flew over his packing-house. Discovered
that a little chopped cheek-meat at two cents a pound was a blamed
sight healthier than chopped pork at six. Reckoned that by running
twenty-five per cent. of it into his pork sausage he saved a hundred
thousand people every year from becoming cantankerous old dyspeptics.
Ham was simply one of those fellows who not only have convolutions in
their brains, but kinks and bow-knots as well, and who can believe
that any sort of a lie is gospel truth just so it is manufactured and
labeled on their own premises. I confess I ran out a line of those
pigs' liver pâtés myself, but I didn't do it because I was such a
patriot that I couldn't stand seeing the American flag insulted by a
lot of Frenchmen getting a dollar for a ten-cent article, and that
simply because geese have smaller livers than pigs.
For all Old Ham was so shrewd at the Yards, he was one of those
fellows who begin losing their common-sense at the office door, and
who reach home doddering and blithering. Had a fool wife with the
society bug in her head, and as he had the one-of-our-leading-citizens
bug in his, they managed between them to raise a lovely warning for a
Sunday-school superintendent in their son, Percival.
Percy was mommer's angel boy with the sunny curls, who was to be
raised a gentleman and to be "shielded from the vulgar surroundings
and coarse associations of her husband's youth," and he was proud
popper's pet, whose good times weren't going to be spoiled by a
narrow-minded old brute of a father, or whose talents weren't going to
be smothered in poverty, the way the old man's had been. No, sir-ee,
Percy was going to have all the money he wanted, with the whisky
bottle always in sight on the sideboard and no limit on any game he
wanted to sit in, so that he'd grow up a perfect little gentleman and
know how to use things instead of abusing them.
I want to say right here that I've heard a good deal of talk in my
time about using whisky, and I've met a good many thousand men who
bragged when they were half loaded that they could quit at any moment,
but I've never met one of these fellows who would while the whisky
held out. It's been my experience that when a fellow begins to brag
that he can quit whenever he wants to, he's usually reached the point
where he can't.
Naturally, Percy had hardly got the pap-rag out of his mouth before he
learned to smoke cigarettes, and he could cuss like a little gentleman
before he went into long pants. Took the four-years' sporting course
at Harvard, with a postgraduate year of draw-poker and natural
history--observing the habits and the speed of the ponies in their
native haunts. Then, just to prove that he had paresis, Old Ham gave
him a million dollars outright and a partnership in his business.
Percy started in to learn the business at the top--absorbing as much
of it as he could find room for between ten and four, with two hours
out for lunch--but he never got down below the frosting. The one thing
that Old Ham wouldn't let him touch was the only thing about the
business which really interested Percy--the speculating end of it. But
everything else he did went with the old gentleman, and he was always
bragging that Percy was growing up into a big, broad-gauged merchant.
He got mighty mad with me when I told him that Percy was just a
ready-made success who was so small that he rattled round in his seat,
and that he'd better hold in his horses, as there were a good many
humps in the road ahead of him.
Old Ham was a sure-thing packer, like myself, and let speculating
alone, never going into the market unless he had the goods or knew
where he could get them; but when he did plunge into the pit, he
usually climbed out with both hands full of money and a few odd
thousand-dollar bills sticking in his hair. So when he came to me one
day and pointed out that Prime Steam Lard at eight cents for the
November delivery, and the West alive with hogs, was a crime against
the consumer, I felt inclined to agree with him, and we took the bear
side of the market together.
Somehow, after we had gone short a big line, the law of supply and
demand quit business. There were plenty of hogs out West, and all the
packers were making plenty of lard, but people seemed to be frying
everything they ate, and using lard in place of hair-oil, for the
Prime Steam moved out as fast as it was made. The market simply sucked
up our short sales and hollered for more, like a six-months shoat at
the trough. Pound away as we would, the November option moved slowly
up to 8-1/2, to 9, to 9-1/2. Then, with delivery day only six weeks
off, it jumped overnight to 10, and closed firm at 12-1/4. We stood to
lose a little over a million apiece right there, and no knowing what
the crowd that was under the market would gouge us for in the end.
As soon as 'Change closed that day, Old Ham and I got together and
gave ourselves one guess apiece to find out where we stood, and we
both guessed right--in a corner.